Author: admin

If you’re developing a website with the intent of being live and thriving for several years to come (meaning legit, value driven content), chances are you’re going to be using a domain name that will have to be branded. You’ll want people to know your domain.

Once you get into the “heads” of your visitors, you’ll start seeing “superaff” and “superaff.com” and “Super Aff” keywords used in search engine stats to find your website. The higher the count, the better the branding job you’re doing (IMO–and that’s just one hint).

But what about those that remember you as “Superaffs” or “SupersAff”? They’re new, you made an impression, your site stuck, but not perfectly. Are you losing traffic to those type-ins (ie. SupersAff.com)?

I’ve been buying a couple/few logical variations of my important domain names that I think people would legitimately recall incorrectly, confusing the actual name (plurals mainly). What was about $10 for a website domain, the cost just shot to $20, $30 or even $40 dollars a year. But that’s super cheap visitor retention IMO, and better you have it than some squatter.

Also consider the parasites that run out and use your “brand” on blogger, wordpress.com, etc. (like sitename.blogger.com). It’s happened to me and initially was peeved, but the good news for that scenario is if they work on building a great site to feed off your “brand”, the first place people usually go to (type-in) is the .com, so you’ll feed off the parasite’s efforts more than they’ll benefit from yours ;). Knowing this happens, you may want to consider running out and grabbing all the big free subdomains too (and develop them a bit so they don’t get deleted). Lotsa work.

Preparation For Next Year: Scope out the massive haunted house exhibits in your area tonight. Note their addresses. About a month before next Halloween, approach them and ask if you can sponsor the exhibit in some way in exchange for your website business cards (or Halloween flyer, etc.) inserted in the treat bags they give away that night. They have *ridiculous amounts* of traffic every year.

I’m seeing something moving and fluxing in Google’s SERPs right now (past two days), and it’s so rocking my world. I don’t know if this is permanent, but past experience tells me that things will kick butt for a few days then settle back down. I can’t help but wish it would stay like this for awhile though.

Google Muscle Flexing & Paid Links: I do feel for those caught in the cross hairs. Many should have known better, but many more learned something startling and important (I think). Google may have stifled or pulled the reins back on the paid link market, but webmasters and SEOs are a very foxy and crafty crowd. The gaming’s not done yet.

The bad news: I think we’ll see more domains slapping no-follows on each and every outbound just because they’re scared of maybe making Google or Matt Cutts mad and don’t want to risk it (somehow some links are bad and it doesn’t seem linking out has any benefit nor does it ever seem to make Google happy, linking is confusing and weird and negative–so just don’t link out and problem solved); The knob will tighten some more and many bloggers/webmasters will refrain from linking out as much; Link bait content creation will explode, raising the bar higher yet for achieving an action-invoking impression; Mom & Pop with small budgets will be squeezed out yet again and won’t be able to compete with the more sophisticated (and subversive-ad-buying-and-contact-heavy-budget-ready) big boys.

Observation & Speculation: The past few months I’ve been seeing a big jump in direct contacts for advertising requests–approached on all but a couple of my domains as well as domain purchase requests. Filtered & trashed. I expect the ad buy and domain purchase requests to jump even more now. I have much larger fish to fry with a good domain, and I’ve never been interested in the measly $20 or $50 or $100 bucks to risk it. And Hell No, I aint sellin!

The Good News: Domains that are trusted will skyrocket in value; For those wanting to cash in on paid links, their prices will jump too but will be much more selective and subversive. Don’t even think about selling a good, developed domain (even minimally) for at least another two years while things shake out a bit.

The “registry fee” is the fee that domain registrars such as Network Solutions and GoDaddy have to pay to VeriSign for each .com or .net domain registered by their clients. To make money, the registrars add their own mark-ups to that fee when charging their customers.

Following suit to the recently announced wholesale price increase for .com and .net domains, the wholesale fees for .info and .org domains are going up 2.5 percent in mid-October. The .info increase takes effect on Oct. 15, while .org prices will go up on Oct. 18. As for domain suffix popularity, .org and .info rank fourth and sixth respectively.

A few days yet to buy new domains and extend current domains at the old prices.

You may want to check the GoDaddy coupons listed here on SuperAff to see if any coupon codes can be applied to your purchases (scroll down for the more current ones).

Mark over @ 45n5 talks about geotargeting ads and keyword tracking for sales to best optimize your blog and fine tune it for sales. While I was writing a comment to his post, I realized this is actually too large and better suited for a blog post–so here it is. Question: Do you know what […]